It’s strange to think, but out of all the movies I’ve seen in my life, I’ve probably watched about nine out of ten just once and never again.

There are lots of reasons this can happen. Most often, it’s because the movie was so thoroughly forgettable that there’s no reason to waste the additional 98 minutes and 1.4 calories required to press the “play” button again. Or, as in the case of, say, “Avatar,” that it was so unrelentingly terrible that I had to stop watching for mental health reasons.

Terrible movies aside, it’s even stranger when it comes to movies I only saw growing up. They leave a certain impression on you that only comes with the (relative) innocence of youth. Like a movie seeming fairly clean but actually being laden with sexual innuendo. Or wondering why Bambi was so sad after his mom went on that vacation. Or wondering why all the people in “Commando” were full of spaghetti sauce.

More recently, though, I’ve been bored enough to actually watch some of these movies a second time. And wow. It’s certainly dissuading me of a few misconceptions…

But let’s get to the Re-View of a movie I saw almost twenty years ago – “Deep Impact.”

Views on this movie were split into two major groups. Half of people remember this movie as “the movie so similar Armageddon that it might have been Armageddon.” And the other half remember it as just “the movie that wasn’t Armageddon.”

Both groups aren’t totally on the mark because this movie is, in fact, a horrible machine that feeds on the tears of parents.

Of course, I had no understanding of this as a child. I fell pretty neatly into the category of people who looked at this as the almost completely forgettable “movie that was sort of like Armageddon but wasn’t and oh, look, Morgan Freeman.”

I remember it not being terrible. In fact, it was actually fairly good, as disaster movies went. And who knows? Maybe things would have played out differently if Armageddon hadn’t come out at pretty much the same time.

Or, you know, not at all, saving us from that damn Aerosmith song about the guy who didn’t like sleeping or something.

Watching it recently, as the parent of a small child, the movie really hits you differently. It was like the difference between my playthroughs of “The Last of Us” pre-baby and post-baby. Before I was a parent, the opening act of the main character’s daughter getting gunned down while he clutches her and begs her not to die, that was rough. When I played it after my son was born, I think I had to go hold him in the middle of the night while he just sort of wondered what the hell was happening.

“If there’s ever a zombie outbreak,” I whispered into his ear, “you have to let me walk in front everywhere, okay?” At which point, he bit me in the shoulder, so that whole thing was messed up on a lot of levels.

To some degree, though, it’s worse in Deep Impact because that movie has a lot of families in a lot of crappy situations. So if any individual plot thread doesn’t tug at your heartstrings just right, they’ve got about thirty or forty to choose from. How about the estranged father who desperately wants to reconnect with his daughter before the world ends? No? How about the family who gets left off the list of people in the shelter and only their daughter gets in? Or the parents who hand off their infant moments before the impact so a guy on a fast bike might get them to safety?

None of those? How about the astronaut who went to space before his son was born and has to sacrifice his life to save the Earth? And his wife and son are late for a last message but get their juuuuuuust in time. But he never sees his son because he was blinded in an accident. Then there’s cooing and “I love yous” exchanged in the final moments before the video feed finally cuts out.

And then, for the last ten minutes, it just lingers on an old dog’s face as it slowly dies in the arms of the boy it grew up with while Johnny Cash plays guitar in the background.

In any event, I thought coming back to this movie after twenty years was particularly strange. Because missing out on sexual innuendo as a kid just means you’re missing out on a movie’s humor. Missing out on the soul-crushing despair in this movie completely changes the subtext. As an adult, you see the disaster as more of just a framing device for a lot of very raw, emotional stories. They could’ve replaced a comet impact with pretty much anything large enough to destroy the Earth but small enough to be stopped by a scrappy team of scientists, and the movie would have been identical.

The only question is, for what diabolical purpose were they harvesting those tears?

A Nerd in Edgewise

I'm just a regular nerd, husband and dad trying to make some sense of a crazy world. New random goodness on an equally random schedule. Real life obligations mean I can't commit to set days, but probably two to three times per week.

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